Supplier Reporting After Stocky: What to Review Each Month

Migrating off Stocky is a starting point, not the finish line. Once your products, inventory, suppliers, and purchase orders are all managed in the Shopify admin, the recurring job is reviewing how each supplier and order actually performed. This guide is for Shopify merchants, small operations teams, and founders who used Stocky and now run that work in Shopify, and who want a repeatable monthly review built from the purchase order views, receiving history, and supplier notes they already keep. It walks through what to look at each month, how to keep notes against each supplier, and where the line sits between the operational views in Shopify and the performance summary you compile on top of them.

Why monthly supplier reporting matters after Stocky

Once you have left Stocky, the day-to-day part of supplier work has moved into Shopify. Purchase orders are created and managed in the Shopify admin, and any individual purchase order can be downloaded as a PDF from the admin to share outside Shopify. That covers the operational side. The recurring job that sits on top of it is reviewing how those orders and suppliers actually performed.

Shopify’s supplier management guidance frames supplier comparison around reliability, product quality, delivery times, and cost, and recommends keeping notes and documentation on each supplier relationship. A regular monthly pass is how you turn scattered orders into a pattern you can act on, instead of relying on memory the next time you place an order with the same supplier. Keep this review qualitative. There are no numeric scores or weightings here, just observations against the four factors above and a follow-up action for each supplier.

If you have not finished the move itself, work through the Stocky migration checklist first, then come back to this routine once your purchase orders and suppliers are live in Shopify.

Start with open and partial purchase orders

The first thing to look at each month is what is still in flight. Shopify lists purchase orders with the statuses Draft, Ordered, Partial, Received, and Closed, and you can view all purchase orders or filter the list by these statuses. The list can also be searched and sorted. If you are still setting up how orders move through these statuses, the Shopify purchase order workflow guide covers the full sequence from creating an order to receiving it.

Filter the list to Ordered and Partial. Ordered shows purchase orders you have placed that have not been received yet. Partial shows orders where some units have arrived but the order is not complete. Together, these are the orders still out with suppliers right now.

For each one, read the estimated arrival date recorded on the purchase order and compare it against today. Anything where the estimated arrival date has already passed is running late. Write the supplier name and the order down in your monthly notes. You are not assigning a score, just recording the fact that the order is overdue so you can chase it and see whether the same supplier shows up again next month.

Review recently received purchase orders

Next, look back at the orders that closed out over the last month. A Shopify purchase order records the products ordered from a supplier with their quantities, prices, payment terms, and an estimated arrival date. Creating the purchase order adds those units to incoming inventory, and receiving the purchase order updates available inventory.

Filter the purchase orders list by the Received and Closed statuses to see what landed in the period you are reviewing. For each one, open the order and compare what was ordered against what actually arrived. Did the quantities match? Were any lines short? When did the order close out, and how does that compare to the estimated arrival date on the same purchase order?

Keep this comparison qualitative. You are noting things like “supplier A arrived two weeks after the estimated date,” or “supplier B was short on one line,” not calculating rates. The point is to read the recent history of each supplier, not to produce a metric.

Look for repeated receiving issues

Receiving records carry a lot of the quality signal about a supplier. When you receive a purchase order in Shopify, you record the quantities that actually arrived as accepted or rejected. Available inventory increases by the accepted quantities. Rejected quantities are removed from incoming inventory, and damaged or missing items can be marked as rejected at that point.

That means rejected quantities are a concrete, factual record of where a delivery did not match what was ordered. A supplier who repeatedly ships short, damaged, or missing items shows up as a recurring pattern of rejected quantities across several orders. During your monthly pass, scan the recently received orders for that pattern. One rejected line on one order is just noise. The same supplier appearing with rejected quantities month after month is worth writing down against their name.

For more on what to check at the moment of receiving so the record is accurate in the first place, see the guide to purchase order receiving quality checks. Keep these as plain observations rather than invented scores. The note “three of this supplier’s last five orders had rejected quantities” is the kind of qualitative record this review is built on.

Compare supplier notes and follow-up actions

Notes are where the review becomes useful next month. Shopify’s supplier management guidance describes comparing suppliers on reliability, product quality, delivery times, and cost, and keeping notes and documentation on each supplier relationship. Use that framing.

For each supplier you placed orders with in the month, write a short note covering what you noticed against those four factors and the follow-up action you intend to take. Reliability might be “missed estimated arrival date on the last two orders, asked supplier for a revised delivery date.” Product quality might be “two orders this month had rejected units for damage, raised with the supplier.” Delivery times and cost work the same way.

Keep the notes in one place per supplier so that next month you can read last month’s entry first and check whether the same issue came up again. That is what turns a single month’s observations into a pattern. Resist the urge to assign numbers or scores. The factors are qualitative on purpose, the same way Shopify frames them.

Separate operational views from performance summaries

It helps to be explicit about two different layers, because they answer different questions and they sit alongside each other.

The first layer is the operational view. The Shopify purchase orders list can be searched, filtered, and sorted, including by columns such as supplier, status, and expected arrival date. That is what you work from day to day to see the state of each order right now: what is still Ordered, what is Partial, what was Received this week, what needs chasing. Working directly with the order data in the Shopify admin is the operational layer.

The second layer is the performance summary. This is a review you compile on top of the same purchase order, receiving, and supplier data already in Shopify, looking at how each supplier performed over a period. It sits alongside Shopify’s operational purchase order views, rather than replacing them. The list, the filters, and the sorting answer “what is the state of this order today.” The monthly summary answers “how has this supplier behaved across their recent orders.”

Keeping the two layers distinct in your head matters, because the tools and habits for each are different. The operational view is built into Shopify. The performance summary is something you assemble from it.

When reporting becomes a scorecard workflow

For a handful of suppliers, the routine in this article is enough. A monthly pass over the purchase orders list, a few minutes per supplier looking at recent receiving outcomes, and a short written note with a follow-up action will keep you on top of supplier performance without much overhead. A simple shared document or spreadsheet of supplier notes works fine at that scale, and a ready-made supplier scorecard template gives you the fields to start from.

As the number of suppliers and purchase orders grows, that hand-compiled summary gets harder to keep up with. Scanning dozens of received orders each month, remembering which supplier had which issue last time, and re-typing notes against each one stops being a quick task. At that point, a dedicated supplier-scorecard tool can take over the repetitive part of turning purchase order and receiving activity into a per-supplier view, so the monthly review becomes reading the summary rather than building it from scratch.

Treat this as an option, not a requirement. Plenty of merchants run the manual routine indefinitely. The question is whether the time you spend assembling the summary each month has started to outweigh the time it would take to set a tool up.

Next steps for supplier review

Migration is done. The data lives in Shopify, in the purchase order list, the receiving history on each order, and the notes you keep against each supplier. The ongoing work is the short, regular review described above, built from purchase order statuses, receiving outcomes, and the notes you write yourself.

A monthly supplier reporting routine can be assembled directly from those three pieces, with follow-up actions written down for each supplier and reviewed on a regular monthly schedule. Set a recurring date in your calendar (the first working day of the month works for most teams) and keep the notes in one place, so that when you come back next month you read last month’s entry first and look for repeats. Patterns become visible only when the notes accumulate, which is why the cadence and the single location matter more than the format.

For a fuller walkthrough of building the review itself, including how to structure the notes against each supplier, see the guide to tracking supplier performance after Stocky.

Limitations

Kijun is not a full Stocky replacement. It does not replace Shopify POS stocktakes, inventory counts, demand forecasting, automatic reordering, or Shopify’s native purchase order and receiving workflows. It helps you build supplier scorecards, not replace Shopify’s native purchase order views or reporting.

Use kijun’s built-in Stocky migration guide to import supported supplier and vendor records, then turn purchase orders recorded in kijun into supplier scorecards. Build monthly supplier scorecards.

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against cited sources through kijun’s editorial workflow. Last updated: 2026-05-26.

Stocky and Shopify are trademarks of Shopify Inc. kijun is not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify.